Gary McKinnon was looking for UFOs, but US blames him for $700,000 of damage.

Gary McKinnon, a UK national who was facing extradition for hacking into Pentagon and NASA computer systems a decade ago, will not be extradited to the United States to face trial. Theresa May, the UK home secretary, has decided to block McKinnon's extradition after medical experts declared that he was likely to kill himself if forced to endure life in an American prison.

May said that McKinnon has Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism, and suffers from depression. "Mr. McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr. McKinnon's human rights," May said. Prosecutors in the UK will now have the option to bring charges against him under domestic laws.

McKinnon's mother, Janis Sharp, was delighted. "Thank you Theresa May from the bottom of my heart," she said, according to the BBC. "I always knew you had the strength and courage to do the right thing."

Using his home computer the appellant, through the internet, identified US Government network computers with an open Microsoft Windows connection and from those extracted the identities of certain administrative accounts and associated passwords. Having gained access to those accounts he installed unauthorised remote access and administrative software called “remotely anywhere” that enabled him to access and alter data upon the American computers at any time and without detection by virtue of the programme masquerading as a Windows operating system. Once “remotely anywhere” was installed, he then installed software facilitating both further compromises to the computers and also the concealment of his own activities. Using this software he was able to scan over 73,000 US Government computers for other computers and networks susceptible to similar compromise.

McKinnon allegedly accessed 53 Army computers, 26 Navy computers, 16 NASA computers, and one computer each at the Department of Defense and the Air Force. McKinnon then allegedly deleted data that included:

"critical operating system files from nine computers, the deletion of which shut down the entire US Army’s Military District of Washington network of over 2000 computers for 24 hours, significantly disrupting Governmental functions"

"2,455 user accounts on a US Army computer that controlled access to an Army computer network, causing these computers to reboot and become inoperable"

"logs from computers at US Naval Weapons Station Earle, one of which was used for monitoring the identity, location, physical condition, staffing and battle readiness of Navy ships, deletion of these files rendering the Base’s entire network of over 300 computers inoperable."

The Pentagon claims McKinnon's actions cost the government $700,000.

McKinnon says his goal was to find evidence that the American government had obtained extraterrestrial technology that it was withholding from the general public.

"I knew that governments suppressed antigravity, UFO-related technologies, free energy or what they call zero-point energy," McKinnon told Wired in 2006. "This should not be kept hidden from the public when pensioners can't pay their fuel bills."

And he claims he found the evidence he was looking for. For example, he alleges that NASA "regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging," but that he found copies of the original, non-airbrushed photos on NASA's servers.

Unfortunately, he says, the original photos were hundreds of megabytes, too large to download over his dial-up modem connection. But he was able to gain "remote control of their desktop, and by adjusting it to 4-bit color and low screen resolution, I was able to briefly see one of these pictures. It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object with geodesic spheres on either side." But he says his access was discovered and cut off before he had time to save copies of the images.

The decade-long fight over McKinnon's extradition has helped to inspire reforms to the UK extradition process. "I have decided to introduce a forum bar," May said. "This will mean that where prosecution is possible in both the UK and in another state, the British courts will be able to bar prosecution overseas if they believe it is in the interests of justice to do so."

It's unclear if the decision not to extradite McKinnon or the changes to UK extradition law will help Richard O'Dwyer, a UK college student who is facing extradition to the United States on copyright charges. Judging from McKinnon's decade-long ordeal, it may take many years for O'Dwyer's extradition fight to be settled.